We have a home grown LMS that has been developed in Microsoft Access. We would like to add to it the ability to host SCORM compliant ELearning modules.

Suggestions?

Thanks,

Craig

Hi Craig,

Depending on your budget and requirements, you would probably be better off to buy or rent an LMS and convert your Access database to the LMS format. Homegrown systems are usually not nearly as capable as an LMS, and the real cost (including employee development time) is so much more than reasonably-priced and open source systems that have been pre-built.

Converting your Access DB would maintain your old records, plus allow for new entries in the database for SCORM-compliant e-learning modules that have been completed.

Sheldon Murphy
Solid State Learning
www.sslearn.com
724-452-6945

Craig,

To decide whether to migrate to a SCORM compliant LMS or build SCORM functionality internally you need to determine if the cost to migrate the courseware and training history to an existing SCORM/AICC LMS is greater than adding SCORM functionality to your system. I tend to think it will be cheaper and more cost effective to migrate, but, if you have a very extensive course library that has specialized data capture, the conversion costs can add up.

I see adding SCORM functionality to your system as a multi-step process. First you must determine what version of SCORM you will be compliant to. I would recommend 1.2 simply because you don’t need to worry about SCO sequencing and you don’t need to support interactions or objectives (unless there were other requirements to support them).

Second, you will need to establish the data-model and tables to support SCORM data. This would be easiest to have as separate tables from your other content, but you would need to have the system populate appropriate fields in the old tables for completion, score, et cetera. This strategy would require separate reports to pull anything granular about the course, but I believe is easier than merging the two types of courses together. This is a technique that I have seen many older LMS vendors use to support their own proprietary course structures and standards based courseware.

Third, you will need to add the ability/process to import the SCORM course into your LMS. This requires a strategy to upload the courses to a web server, create the appropriate course structure and sco objects, populate with database with details specified in the course manifest, and establish any other configurations for the course that your system requires.

And finally, you need to create the SCORM run time environment. This will need to launch the courses, provide sco-to-sco navigation, store and retrieve course data in the database via a SCORM API, and trigger course and sco completion appropriately.

This clearly is a non trivial task to add to any system and would take a significant amount of planning and development to get it in place. So, I would make sure that migrating the training history and existing courses (do they need updating anyway?) to a new system is not cheaper than extending the current system.